1 - 10 Years On

Jim Skillen talks with Bob Sweetman about the aftermath of the events of
September 11, 2001.

"...almost the only rallying point for national unity is
defense of the nation, defense of freedom..."

Bob Sweetman:
What does 9/11 and its significance look like 10 years down the road?

Jim Skillen:
An event like that – the amount of destruction, the symbolism of
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon under attack, and so forth –
was something that would not easily be forgotten by any country. So
on a 10th anniversary, to stop, remember and reflect on its
significance, is certainly worthwhile and an expression of legitimate
patriotism.

However,
if you compare 9/11 with the significance of Pearl Harbor that
brought the United States into World War II, or with World War I, the
Civil War or Vietnam, it doesn’t compare. And therefore one can
anticipate that such a time of national remembrance of 9/11 will lose
its potency in another decade or two.

Part
of my reason for thinking this is that I believe the U.S. made a
mistake in rushing quickly to declare war against terrorism. The
attacks themselves were committed by terrorists – international
criminals. They stole planes and used box cutters as weapons. There
was no military attack; there was no invading military force of
another country backing the criminals.

And
yet, for the most part, we in the U.S. interpreted the attacks from
the viewpoint of what I would call an underlying civil religion:
"America is God’s chosen nation and is being attacked unjustly on
its own territory, so something very serious must be happening,
something of cosmic proportion." Insofar as American citizens view
their country as the lead nation in the world, anything that
threatens America can be seen as the equivalent of a threat to true
progress in history and must, therefore, be stopped. Quickly, 9/11
was hyped to the point where the people who died in the World Trade
Center were thought of as war heroes who had sacrificed their lives
for the sake of this righteous nation and its divinely appointed
mission in the world.

Bob: Why was that?

Jim:
I believe 9/11 occurred at a time of great crisis in the country –
a crisis of many decades, at the root of the American civil religion.
The 9/11 event and the "wars" that have followed have been caught
up in a larger domestic political battle over the meaning of America
and over who may legitimately lead the country. Is this still God’s
chosen nation, the exceptional nation? What then is its mission? Does
the future of democracy, freedom and prosperity depend ultimately on
America’s preeminence in the world? The identity and chief purposes
of the country have been called into question in recent decades,
especially since Vietnam. And the battle has been fueled by the end
of the Cold War and the most recent economic crises.

By the early 1990s,
when it appeared democracy and freedom had triumphed over communism,
a vacuum was created. What should America do now? It seems to me 9/11
partially filled the vacuum. Terrorism became the new communism.
Sometimes it is easier to call a nation to stand against a great
threat than it is to rally the people to achieve constructive
purposes that not everyone agrees to. Yet in my view, the band of
terrorizing criminals should not have been elevated to the level of a
world-threatening, demonic force. Instead, the U.S. should have
called for and initiated a major international co-operative effort in
policing and intelligence gathering. We should have treated those who
committed the devastating attacks as unworthy of recognition and
treatment as a dominant history-making movement in the world.

The
American "war" response to the attackers has not stopped
terrorism but it has caused considerable confusion and uncertainty in
the world (as well as in the U.S.) with regard to the criteria of
justifiable defense and the legitimacy of America’s anti-imperial
imperialism (as Niall Ferguson calls it). In such circumstances and
with many other irresolvable problems at hand, a 10th-anniversary
event to memorialize 9/11 is designed and used by some to try to keep
the fire of civil-religious nationalism burning. But that will be
increasingly difficult to do because the reality is not what the hype
cracks it up to be. Joblessness, deepening poverty and continuing
economic paralysis now appear to be of far greater concern to
Americans than the "war" on terrorism.

Bob:
Is the sort of religious coloration of the meaning of this attack one
that would really have entered into the councils of the government
per se? Or do your comments reflect a broader societal discussion in
the U.S. that public officials should take into account but perhaps
do not?

Jim:
There is a problem today with talk of civil religion. An American
president is not likely to say (though George W. Bush came very close
to saying), "it’s our religious mission now to take on these
terrorists," or "in order to maintain my fealty to the American
civil religion, I must now do this or that." Many citizens no
longer like the phrase civil religion. Robert Bellah and others have
examined the American civil religion carefully, but most commentators
today say they don’t know what it means. And of course there are
many people in the U.S. who by their own definition are not
religious, and they are not concerned that the republic was birthed
in the new-Israel myth. It is just a secular nation now.

Moreover,
there were other factors involved in President Bush’s declaration
of war so soon after the 9/11 attacks. One of those factors is the
federal structure of the political system. A president only has
maximum room to maneuver when he’s functioning as Commander in
Chief of the armed forces at war. There were many such pragmatic
reasons for deciding to centralize all efforts against terrorism in
the office of the Commander in Chief, in a perpetual war.

Most
people, including most public officials, I suspect, are unconscious
of the fact that when they think of the nation and its actions, they
are thinking from out of a deep-rooted civil religion. For most
American Christians, Christ is Savior of souls for eternity and the
church is the institution that embodies that narrative of salvation.
But in their minds, that narrative does not seem at odds with the one
about God choosing America as a new Israel to guide the world to its
true end of democracy, freedom and prosperity in this age. Yet these
are very different religious stories and do not fit together the way
so many think they do. From a biblical point of view, I would argue,
the American civil-religious narrative (and any such civil-religious
narrative) is heresy that contradicts the Bible’s narrative of
God’s covenants with Israel and the nations through Israel’s
Messiah.

So
I think there are two parallel salvation stories held by American
Christians. One is the story of salvation from sin for eternal life
through Jesus Christ, but in today’s world that is considered a
privately held religion, a parochial religion. The public salvation
story of God blessing America for a new-Israel mission has to do with
earthly history. In the telling of this story the name of Jesus
Christ is not acknowledged, because the god of America is the
American god, the god of all Americans.

There
is yet another factor I want to mention. In the U.S. you will hear
repeated expressions of the love of the nation but of distrust of
government. The nation is played off against government. Ronald Regan
ran for president with the theme of saving the nation by getting
government off the backs of the American people. Part of the ideal of
the nation is its freedom from the British monarchy, freedom from a
strong central government. In fact, according to the founding liberal
ideology of government, it would be best that we didn’t have
government at all. Free persons are not by nature political
creatures.

Against
this backdrop, I’ve concluded after many years of talking with
people that Americans do not generally associate the military with
government
but rather with the
nation.
The military defends the nation and its free citizens from attack and
oppression. The military is not part of the government bureaucracy
that many, particularly on the right, deride as wasteful, as an
instrument of misguided interference in individual and market
freedoms. With the political process and government in Washington
facing ever greater crises of confidence and paralysis, it is all the
more clear that almost the only rallying point for national unity is
defense of the nation, defense of freedom, against a threatening
outside enemy.

Bob:
One of the things that I’ve certainly been struck by in Christian
interventions in politics in other parts of the world is Truth and
Reconciliation processes, like in South Africa and so on. Is there
any kind of broadening of American reflection on the West’s
relationship to Islam, for example, that would have the kind of
character represented by Truth and Reconciliation efforts?

Jim:
Yes, there is quite a bit of that, but it is conducted almost
entirely at the non-government level – churches and other groups
working to promote conflict resolution, Christian-Muslim dialogue,
and overcoming racial prejudice and profiling. At the government
level things are different. It’s been a rule of thumb, for example,
that any politician, certainly a president, who addresses matters
associated with Islam should state Islam is a religion of peace.
Islam is not the problem; only the terrorists are our enemies. But
even the best efforts of government dedicated to fighting racism,
religious bigotry and fear of foreigners, are a long way from Truth
and Reconciliation commissions that try to deal with the kinds of
public wrongs done on both sides against prisoners of war, the
killing of civilians, mistaken arrests of suspected terrorists and
more.

These
are but a few of my reflections on 9/11 and its aftermath, Bob. Thank
you for interviewing me.

Jim Skillen is the former president of the Center for Public Justice (U.S.) and author of With or Against the World? America’s Role Among the Nations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005)

Bob Sweetman is the H. Evan Runner Chair in the History of Philosophy at
ICS